


the blame game

by colonelkepler



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Dialogue, Lots of it, What-If, maxwell is Angery, what if jacobi died instead of maxwell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 02:50:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13157682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colonelkepler/pseuds/colonelkepler
Summary: In the aftermath of a mutiny, Maxwell and Kepler sit together in the observation deck. They talk about the friends they’ve lost.





	the blame game

**Author's Note:**

> this is my piece for the wolf 359 big bang! thank you SO much for joining me in this wild ride for this wild podcast, it's meant to much to me! i hope yall stick around!!

The silence stretches between them. It’s not  _ truly  _ silent; you never quite reach the absence of noise on a station where the background is filled with beeping, whirring, and groaning in the walls, but it’s as close to quiet as you can get. There is, at least, a notable absence of certain sounds.

The absence of Jacobi’s sarcastic quips isn’t something Maxwell thought she would dread, but recent events haven’t been paying much attention to what Maxwell thinks. And so, she misses his snark – she misses him. She fidgets, and every time she moves too abruptly there’s an indignant clink from the handcuffs holding her here, and the noises distract her from her thoughts. Kepler, however, is still. Kepler is silent. He eyes her, as if she’s a curiosity.

The third or fourth time Maxwell shifts, she stops and catches his eye.

When they look at each other, the silence stretching between them compresses, becomes tangible and dense, takes form before her eyes. To her, it looks like a bullet. It hangs in the air, suspended and ethereal; of course, that would be beautiful, usually. There’s nothing Maxwell values more (usually) than silence, the absence of words, the world of the verbal slinking back as her thoughts take over. Her thoughts can take up the entire room. They don’t leave space for words.

Often, Alana’s thoughts are beautiful. At times, they are far from it. This is one of those times.

If she closes her eyes, and ignores the cool touch of metal on her wrist, she can think back to the silence she shared with Jacobi. At a terminal, Jacobi providing some much-needed quiet company, the only sound pushing past the background noise a series of clacks on a keyboard and hums from a mind at work; in their quarters, late at what would probably be night – you can’t tell, anymore – after the breeze of conversation had died down, and they were left in a comfortable stillness. They are alone, and they are content.

“Maxwell,” she hears, and the illusion is shattered. Her eyes snap open, and there is no longer a bullet hanging between her and Kepler. His voice is soft, too soft for him, and she wants to hit back with something hard. Harsh words from a biting tongue, enough to rip the sympathetic tone from his mouth, so that he can’t pretend he’s about to say anything that’ll help –

“Yes?” Her reply is barely a mew compared to the roar she’d been hoping to let out, schooled into complacent attention from years of humouring Kepler’s voice. Force of habit.

It’s not always a chore to listen to her superior – before now, Maxwell would have hesitantly called him a friend – but, right now, she would far rather listen to the stony silence. She’s not afforded the luxury, however, as Kepler continues.

“I know you’ve dealt with a lot.” Understatement. “And I know that you showed outstanding skill under difficult circumstances.” Overstatement. Maxwell scowls, ignores the Daniel in her head calling her a petty teenager.

“Thank you, sir,” and the words are meaningless, too polite, purely a formality. She knows that his words are the same. She knows that they are the gentle prelude to a true sentiment, and she is certain that it is not one she wants to hear.

Kepler offers her a level stare, and she stares back. He looks tired. The scars dipping from his forehead to his eyes are a familiar sight, possibly the only familiar sight on his face; the bags under his eyes, a deepening purple-grey, are new. The tangles in his hair, beginning to match hers, are new. If only Jacobi were here to see him, Maxwell thinks, and then the thought shortens to simply -  _ if only Jacobi were here _ . She focuses on Kepler’s scars.

“But,” he continues, and she has to pay attention to him and his words. Considering the path her mind had been taking, Maxwell considers that the smallest of blessings. Of course, any compliment of his would be followed with a but, something to sour the air, which - is it her, or is the air growing colder? Maybe it’s Hera’s idea of a prank.

Maxwell knows that, if she were to ask Hera about it, she wouldn’t get an answer. Kepler keeps talking.

“It’s time to stow away whatever you’re feeling, and face your situation.” He leans forward, and his cuffs reflect the light as he moves his wrists, as if to punctuate his point. Maxwell holds his gaze; there’s something genuine in his eyes, not quite pleading, not so pathetic. He’s imploring her. “It’s time to make a plan.”

And the professional dwelling within her brain, the part that fully understands what kind of situation she’s sitting in, bound as a prisoner of war, agrees. A calm background buzz, growing and growing until she can’t ignore the rational part of herself, already beginning to scheme. 

She would only need to wait until Hera goes offline - it’s routine, a simple debugging run, every so often. She’s guided Hera into them before. While she’s gone, of course, Maxwell could work her magic. All Kepler would need to provide is some time. It would be _ ridiculously  _ simple to pull this mess back into her own hands.

During the moments of silence, in which this plan has been coming together - a primordial soup of ideas and plans and desires to get a hold back over the crew who ripped everything important away from her - her superior has been waiting. He looks expectant. A faint smile threatens to settle into his features. He thinks, he  _ knows _ that she will sit here and talk business with him, because that is how it’s always been.

You ignore the bad. You ignore the pain. You focus on the man who doesn’t seem to feel it, and you follow him, and you forget how it feels to be human.

Except, this time, she doesn’t quite want to forget about her humanity. She’d forget about it whenever she or Jacobi ventured too far into the spectrum of emotion during their conversations, whenever she had to put a bullet between someone’s eyes - because, believe it or not, it still hurts to let something as interesting as a human life die - and whenever the hassle of existing in a physical form became too much to bear. Doing so has only ever led to a dead best friend and a stunted heart, beating alone and out of time.

“No,” she replies, and watches the half-smile drop from Kepler’s face.  
“Maxwell -” There’s a new sound entering his voice, a warning. Maxwell knows what will come next.  _ This isn’t a request _ , he’ll say;  _ this is an order. I’m still your commanding officer.  _ It’s become incredibly difficult for anyone to surprise her, least of all Kepler - then again, she never thought he’d let Daniel die. That was a surprise.  
“ _ No _ .” What’s the point in letting him finish, she thinks, if you already know what he’s going to say? It’s best to get to the point. This time, the other part of her brain - the part that has been itching to headbutt the man in front of her, to spit and claw and scream - is starting to push its way through into her voice, and it’s almost shocking, how defiant she manages to sound. As if prompted by her own tone, she goes on.  
“Whatever plan we wind up with, it won’t be worth pulling off without Jacobi. Sir.” The  _ sir _ is an afterthought, and hardly born out of respect. Kepler closes his eyes, sighs, as if he were waiting to hear that - he probably was. The bastard still isn’t showing any sign of genuine emotion.  
“We don’t have time for this.”

He’s not raising his voice at her; usually, when his anger is quiet, Maxwell is at her most alert. She would never call herself scared of him, prides herself on her lack of fear (even if it’s more of a reckless abandonment), but she would allow herself to be  _ wary _ . If only for Jacobi’s sake - the man who understood how to fear Kepler, unlike Maxwell, and even more unlike Maxwell, understood how to love him. Love would often win out over fear, and it would be Alana who smacks some sense into that useless brain of his.

Occasionally, it would be Alana who bore the brunt of Kepler’s icy rage. Jacobi wouldn’t let it go for about a week, every single time, and he would take on his sternest big-brother voice to order her  _ never _ to do that again, but Maxwell has never been very good at listening to people.

Still, asides from anger, and an unfeeling impatience, she can’t hear anything in Kepler’s voice. Ever the professional: even when he kills the only man who looked at him as if he’d personally designed the planet for him.

Of course, that serves to piss her off more. And - when she directs her anger at her superior, Maxwell can ignore the guilt gnawing at her insides, over failing to protect him this time. A bullet in his skull; neither she nor Kepler put it there, but they are both to blame.

“We’re sitting here in handcuffs, sir. We don’t exactly have any  _ duties _ to perform. I’d say we have plenty of time for this.” Her tone evens out, begins to match his in its cold professionalism, and - surprisingly - Kepler relents. His sigh is quiet.  
“Fine. Do you want to  _ talk  _ about what happened? Because I’m not a therapist, I’m a  _ commander _ -”  
“Not right now, you’re not,” Maxwell interjects, and hides a rueful grin at the twitch in his eyelid.  
“And that’s precisely the problem, Doctor.” He finishes, staring at her like he’s trying to teach her kindergarten-level maths.  _ Two plus two is four, Maxwell, and I need to be in control.  
_ “And it’s a problem I will solve.”  _ I _ , she notices after it leaves her mouth, not  _ we _ . Without Jacobi, even with one other SI5 member sat in front of her, there is no we. 

She used to enjoy solo missions, the feeling of trading  _ we _ for  _ I _ . Now, they just feel empty.

She moves on, swiftly, before a goddamn pronoun trips her up and brings unwanted tears to her eyes. “But we will solve it  _ after  _ we talk about everything. Consider it a sitrep.”  
That, at least, reassures him - but he still looks uncertain, behind that constructed mask. This is uncharted territory for them both.  
“Okay,” he says, even more slowly than normal, “the crew of the Hephaestus carried out a mutiny. It succeeded. The contact event that we predicted followed soon after, and now, we’re in here. Prisoners of war.”   
“And the casualties?”  
She can see Kepler gritting his teeth. “Doctor Hilbert, and Mr Jacobi.”  
“ _ Not  _ Captain Lovelace, which was surprising to everyone except you. I don’t need to ask to know that you knew about that from the start. What I do need to ask, is why the  _ hell  _ didn’t you tell me?”

If she had known, maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe she would have been able to do her job properly, for one thing - interpreting the language of an alien species is a little easier when you’re aware of the specimen sitting in the same ship as you - and maybe, just maybe, he would have lived. If anything had been different, if she could’ve known as much as Kepler knew, there’s the slimmest chance that she could have negotiated that minefield of a mutiny without losing him.

“You didn’t need -”  
“Don’t.”  
“It would’ve changed how you were doing your job. And I didn’t want that to change.”  
There’s a silence, as both of them pause. A few heavy moments pass between them, sinking as heavy as lead into the floor, clogging up the air around them, until Kepler speaks up again.  
“It wouldn’t have helped him, Alana.”  
His words are an apology - a genuine apology, and it throws her. She almost wishes she could rewind to when she thought there was no emotion hiding in the Colonel’s skull, because then, she could stay angry. Now, she’s still angry, but her brain is throwing confusion into the mix.  
“You don’t know that,” she replies, and watches Kepler settle back into a comfort zone, a smooth mask of a face. The ease with which this happens leads Maxwell to wonder whether she’d imagined that slip of sincerity, a mirage formed by a mind desperate to find a grief in Kepler to match her own.  
“I suppose I don’t,” is all he says.  _ Is that all _ , she wants to demand of him; but it would only lead to him asking her what she  _ wants  _ him to say, and she’ll be forced to admit that she doesn’t know.

She just wants more than this.

“Next question, then.” Maxwell cannot keep her voice steady, as much as she tries, but Kepler seems to ignore the tremor in her words. His eyes are on her, measuring her, no doubt: trying to predict exactly when she will snap. As it turns out, that moment comes right about now. “Why did you kill Mr Jacobi?”  
Another pause. Perhaps it’s another mirage, but something on his expression flickered for a split second.  
“You’re being dramatic.”  
“You’re being apathetic.”  
“I’m being a  _ professional _ ,” he raises his voice, here, answers far too quickly, as though she’s  _ offended _ him, and continues, “something that I thought you were also capable of being. You can play the blame game if you want to, Doctor Maxwell, but there’s only one person who put that bullet between his eyes. And it wasn’t either of us.”

Ah. They’re back to Doctor Maxwell, Colonel Kepler. Back to  _ being a professional. _ Except, somewhere along the line - perhaps it was during the mutiny, perhaps at the sound of the gunshot, perhaps afterwards, when Hera refused to speak to her and Daniel  _ couldn’t _ speak to her - Maxwell’s professionalism was lost. In its place stood humanity, cold and stark and vulnerable, and all of the twisting rage that comes with it.

“You put him in that line of fire, and you don’t even care enough to admit it. He gave you  _ everything _ ," she snaps. Despite the venomous bite in her words, Kepler remains unmoved, giving her nothing but a level stare that makes her want to punch some emotion into him. Emotion that she isn’t just imagining. The handcuffs stop her from carrying out such an act, and she hopes her stare is enough to make the man realise he should be grateful for that - as it is, there's a pause, as the words settle between them.  
"That was his job," Kepler replies at last, his tone as even as his look. "You gave me everything, too."  
"I shouldn't have." When he doesn’t answer, simply narrows his eyes, Maxwell lowers her gaze to her handcuffs, lets out a huff of bitter laughter. “Besides, I never gave you as much as he did.”

Of course he gave more of himself to this game of loyalty. Jacobi always fancied that he knew Kepler - at least, better than everyone else did - and, despite Maxwell’s warnings, placed every last inch of his trust in the man’s abilities.  _ Trust is important _ , he’d say, to throw off anything she tried to say about it.  
_ Of course it is _ , she’d say,  _ I trust him too. But this is more than trust.  
_ Jacobi would only grin -  _ what is it, then _ , he would always ask, and she could never bring herself to answer. Saying it makes it real.

“He loved you,” she says, and swears she can hear Kepler’s breath catch in his throat.  
She lifts her eyes to meet his, except his look, usually so sharply focused on her, is elsewhere.  
“I see.”   
The hum and beep of the equipment surrounding them is becoming deafening, so deafening, the glow of the star getting far too bright and far too hot - can Kepler feel that, too? It’s making her feel ill. She shuts her eyes. The roaring in her senses washes over her, and when she can finally move and face the real world again - she’s not sure how long it took - he’s sat in the exact same position he was in before, staring into the empty space of the room as if he sees a ghost standing there.

Perhaps he does. She won’t ask if he does, because he just may answer, and saying it makes it real. She hasn’t started seeing ghosts, yet.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Maxwell says (even though it matters more than anything), and Kepler still doesn’t shift his gaze. She’s not sure if he’s even registering her words. “We can blame everyone on this ship for him - God knows I do, but…”  
She trails off. Hesitates.  
“At least I have the decency to blame myself, too.”

Kepler finally looks at her.

He doesn’t answer.

They lapse back into silence, and another machine begins to hum.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, you can see me at @colonelkepler on tumblr, @mocaxe on twitter


End file.
